Paul said the energy level was a bit low during the seminar, thought Max was on the contrary excellent. He raised some points that truly I have never considered in the past, very constructive discussions we had, I think.

This book is also fun to read: Built to Last by James Collins, who is one of the well-known American business consultant.

Not sure, if you can sort of relate this to effective leadership.

Some interesting points he made in the book was what mattered to the company was not the leader, but leadership, the culture & environment of nurturing and educating leaders, the succession plan, etc,.

He did advocate or sort of interpreted innovation as drastic changes or one even could say risking, betting or gambling on the future. This maybe criticised by some as his research was based on biased samples, as he focused on only the success but not the failure. However he did compare the success with a less success or even failure. I think his point perhaps was that the company must has the environment or culture of realising that a change is required, and is able to commit to this change at an organisational level. As they say, Nothing Endures but Change.

A book to recommend on OL, Living Company by Arie deGeus, former head of Royal Dutch/Shell's Strategic Planning Group.

Luckily you can find this book in the library, I think it is out of print, and you can only get it as a second hand now.

Many of his thoughts, I guess perhaps they had a great influence on how Shell construct its corporate image towards the society. I remember reading an article in Fortune magazines, that Shell had setup a department which in charge of corporate responsibilities, and most of the staff in that department were recruited from Green Peace. Very interesting strategy indeed.

However, in the book, Arie deGeus gave more insight on OL, not only using his experience at Shell, but of other companies based on the research that he has conducted through his years with Shell. I think his focus was more on what is the game and why is it important winning the game instead of how to play the game to some extend.

There are many different excellence models, there are also few models which intends to evaluate/value the intellectual capital/intangible assets which covers some similar areas of what mentioned in the excellence models.

Here is an alternative, Skandia Navigator.

One of the interesting aspects of this model is, it considers Financial Focus(Business Results) as Focus on the Past, Human, Customer & Process which are the 3 key factorts of generating Products/Services as the Focus of Today, Renewal & Development Focus as the Future.

I think I really enjoy the content and style of how this course is structured. The content is most times about common sense which I like the most. The teaching style gives you loads of freedom & space. In fact, it is very similar to the self-studies that I have done when I was still working. The only difference now, are that I have more time, guidance and a forum for discussion are provided. The only sort of disadvantage is you can not practise what you have learned or reflected right away.

Found something interesting, in IMC105, it seems that WebEx is installed. But the strange thing is Paul said it is connected to Academic Databases, find that really really strange. Got to have a look how they are using it.

Really like the idea of what Paul has written down regards web conferencing. However I still wonder, Warwick every able to get the ROI by selling these sort of tools & systems to other universities? One of the things, that I still question is the reliability & functionalities of these tools/systems that we developed in house. The blogs editors still can be unstable from time to time, if you are writing something long, better save it from time to time, otherwise you might lose it when you are adding a link, a picture, or something else calls a bit complex than normal functions. The problem is, if you save too frequent, the nice format you had, can be massed up some how. Also, I seriously doubt why developing in-house tools when there is better tools suites our purpose and much wider. Isn't it kind of Society waste? Especially when the spell checker thinks I spelled "blogs" wrong! lol!

I still think Forum would not be the suitable tools for Team Project. Simply because of the timeframe is restricted, the collaboration community is extremely small, also Internet Forum is just a fancier version of UseNet Newsgroup & nothing more. From a pure functionality point view, neither of them was able to really surpass their predecessor BBS, a Bulletin Board System. Sure GUI & some other functions have improved dramatically, but still an asynchronous system. I think Internet Forum/Usenet Newsgroup/BBS they are more suitable where the collaboration community is large or open, where time is a less concern. Similar to many board systems, they are best at broadcasting information but also enable people to comment.

Where an interactive communication is required, I think the best work environment is still takes the form of meeting. There are many web conference tools on the market place such as WebEx founded by Cisco. Unfortunately, it is not university’s intention to use a commercial product which can be integrated into other products such as Outlook, MSN Messenger, etc.

The intention of using forum is for brain storming, but the design of internet forum is for broadcasting information. The difference is when a Team is trying to solve a problem is, the normal approach is analyzing the problem & brainstorming as a team, then develop a plan or approach solving the problem and divide all the necessary work among team members. During the session analyzing the problem & brainstorming, where are interactive collaboration environment is required. Maybe pre & post to this session, forum is still suitable in most cases, but not for this particular meeting. Unfortunately, the portion of this session for small projects tends to have a high weight in comparison with some medium or large projects.

There were suppose to be 12 people in the competition, however as the uncertainties of life, it knocked us (Team 1), from 4 members to 2 (Tai & me).

I guess the very right thing that we have done in the beginning, was splitting the tasks. We knew we could not have the luxury to spend lots of time on brainstorming and getting things right, since there are only 4 hands between us.

But we did sort of think it through on how to make a tall & durable paper giraffe, it must has short legs, large body providing as a solid base.

Another trick was, we made the components of the neck more like a cone instead of a column. What team 2 has done, also gave us a hint on strengthening the necks before installing it on the body. Team 2 were a lot faster than us, since they had 4 people, when they finished install their neck, they realised our neck is getting longer than theirs, so they removed the head and made some extensions. They need some paper to wrap around the neck to support and strength it, they were struggling with it because it is very hard to do it in the air after the neck is installed. We did observe that and start strengthening our neck before install it to the body.

We also didn't make our body really dense, so give us more flexibility when we added the necks and legs to the body. We were able to adjust the angles, and find the centre of gravity. The body was then stuffed with small pieces of paper to make it more solid.

A few thoughts on good teamwork:

study the goal & rules, cascade the goal into sub-deliverables, and splitting the tasks to team member's strength not weakness

have a sense of urgency, spend less time on discussing not important or not relevant issues